Practical experience of a developing country
There was no great culture shock for Nina Bull Jørgensen, a trained, widely travelled journalist. Her previous employment was with UNDP in Denmark but she felt that she needed practical experience of working in a developing country.
This led to her move to Mozambique, where her first work was on a UNESCO media project. Six months ago she started as a communications worker for COWI's subsidiary, COWI Moçambique, which merged with a local consultancy firm in July to form AustralCOWI.
Reaching small organisations
Nina's assignments include working on a project which supports the development of civil society in Mozambique. AustralCOWI administers a distribution scheme for funding grass roots organisations which are key building blocks of civil society.
As a communications worker Nina's responsibilities include ensuring that information on available funding reaches the often very small and dispersed organisations in that vast country.
Only a little Portuguese
Nina relishes her involvement in development work of a very tangible nature and has no regrets about taking the plunge and moving
the family to Africa.
"Naturally there was an element of risk, partly because I hardly spoke any Portuguese. The first few months were a bit hard, for example adjusting to the fact that if you have help in the house you don't have much privacy - and people have a far more relaxed approach to time. But life is good here. For the boys, this is home," she says.
"The people at AustralCOWI have the same work ambitions as I do. In some ways I prefer the style and approach here to ours at home. People don't criticise and are good at listening to each other before drawing conclusions."
By Janne Toft Jensen, jaje@cowi.dk
Published: 17.09.2007
